Protestant Missionaries and Native Culture: Parallel Careers of Asher Wright and Silas T. Rand

Abstract

T IS A CONVENTION THAT ANTHROPOLOGISTS view Christian missionaries as disruptive agents of culture change. As Nigel Barley points out, young anthropologists know all about missionaries before they've met any and [missionaries] play a large role in the demonology of the subject [anthropology], beside self-righteous administrators and exploitive colonials (1986: 28). While Stipe (1980: 166) denies anthropologists receive systematic indoctrination, he perceives within the discipline a basically negative attitude of anthropologists toward missionaries. It is the missionary's goal to replace indigenous religion with Christianity and to alter other aspects of behavior to the norms of Western society. Anthropologists expect individuals who assume such a role to be personally ethnocentric, possibly to an extreme degree. Some are. Chagnon quotes a Catholic priest as saying, I believe the Yanomamo are subhuman-they act like animals and lack the essential faculties of being human (1983: 205). Chagnon also reports a very personal and very hostile encounter with an Evangelical Protestant missionary, Pete, while Chagnon was taking hallucinogens with Yanomamo friends (Chagnon 1983: 206-210). Another example that can be cited, from the other side of the globe, is the Jigalong Mission in Western Australia, where ethnocentric attitudes have been superbly described by Tonkinson. He reports that members of the mission talk with conviction about the faults of the Aborigines: low intelligence, male cruelty, laziness, blatant lying, depraved sexual behavior, lack of hygiene, and complete lack of gratitude for goods and services rendered (Tonkinson 1974: 127). However, not all missionaries carry extreme ethnocentrism as part of their personal cultural baggage.1 Some become fascinated by the culture of the people they have come to convert. Indeed, their intellectual interest in an exotic culture leads them to seek out, and even form an intellectual alliance with, some of the more conservative persons in the society whose members they are trying to convert. This is because these conservatives constitute an intellectual elite of the society (see Liberty 1978); they are the bearers of the oral tradi-